No comment… 
6 Likes
I can see a lot of us wanting to rationalize/motivate our huge amount of money and hours spent home in the sim as something that might save time/money IRL when it comes to future flight training(or even be the hero on a passenger flight if all crew suddenly becomes incapacitated).
But to be honest, I highly doubt my many hundreds (maybe 1,000s) of sim time even shaved off 5-10 hours in total IRL PPL / IR / CPL / ME training, probably less, maybe even a negative balance given stuff that had to be unlearned…
Personally, I picked up a handful of bad habits both scan & systems that took a few RL lessons to iron out completely. Sure, I was comfy in the cockpit during my first FW lesson and got to fly the whole lesson without any instructor control input at all, including landings, but that’s about it. (rotary-pilot before fixed wing, so hardly a claim to fame). Kind of like successfully driving a stick-shift car on your first driving lesson without stalling the engine.
Home-siming before having maneuvers / procedures properly explained by a CFI can easily put you behind instead of ahead of the game. But after having flown the first bunch of ifr-lessons, having a home sim was a nice way of repeating what you learned during the lessons. But I ended up with pretty much same hours flown before the practical tests as my non-simming classmates.
And my wife, heck she pretty much hovered a helicopter on her first attempts
(not aspiring pilot, just got the chance to try it out) , so I’m more leaning towards natural aptitude rather than hours spent in front of a computer.
I flew simulators before getting licenses and making it my job, and I kept flying simulators afterwards. It’s fun! I will definitely keep flying all sims available until I retire, and probably afterwards too. But am I ahead of my collogues that never played around with simulators on their free time? Nope.
5 Likes
With mouse really is not 
Horrible story.
FYI this had nothing to do with his “bag of luck”. This was all about making decisions.